The best we can do?--Sybille Bedford's classic account of a famous British murder trial.

AuthorNormey, Rob

During Canada's most talked about court case of the year, the sexual assault trials of Jian Ghomeshi, defence counsel Marie Heinen in her final argument quoted the American jurist John Wigmore. He memorably stated that cross-examination in a trial is the greatest legal engine for the discovery of truth ever invented. As I write this, the decision in the case is reserved and will be rendered next month. What the Ghomeshi case has in common with the famous British murder trial, R. v. Dr Bodkin Adams, is a situation where a great number of horrible accusations have been made about an accused prior to trial, creating a black cloud of suspicion. Let us suspend our judgment for the time being in the Ghomeshi matter but instead travel back in time to the Bodkin Adams trial. It commenced at the Old Bailey in London on March 18, 1957 (three weeks later the eccentric doctor would be acquitted by a jury).

All true crime aficionados owe a debt of gratitude to the distinguished British novelist Sybille Bedford who turned her hand in two books and several essays to the reporting of major trials and to penetrating analyses of both the trials and their wider cultural and social significance. As she puts it in The Faces of Justice, an account of the trial process in several European countries: "The law, the working of the law, the daily application of the law to people and situations, is an essential element in a country's life." Bedford emphasizes that the law, in fact, is part of the pattern of a society like its architecture and art.

In 1957 Bedford took it upon herself to attend every day of the trial at the Old Bailey and provide for her readers an hour by hour account of this sensational trial of a doctor accused of murdering two of his patients. News stories painted a lurid account of a pathological and venal man who may well have been responsible for the deaths of more than one hundred of his elderly female patients, in circumstances where he stood to inherit large sums from them. In her introduction to the book that she crafted, The Best We Can Do, she explains that a prime motivation for her was her frustration and lack of satisfaction with the newspaper reporting of criminal trials. She formed the conviction that the hourly chase after sensations and the fragmentary and often illogical nature of news reports was a clear disservice to citizens. Bedford hence took her immense powers of observation and characterization and applied them to all the...

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